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In the period 17-18 June, the IJC organized the training program Combating hate speech in online media, which was attended by 12 journalists and web-site administrators from different regions of the country. During the training, experts presented various aspects regarding administration of discriminatory comments, written by the media consumers.
Tudor Darie, director of Interact Media, held a session about the online media situation in Moldova and development perspectives of the generalist and niche websites, rules of comments administration in online media and aspects of ethics regarding the administration and banning of some comments that use hate speech and discriminate vulnerable social categories.
T. Darie referred as well to various technical solutions that can prevent such reactions from the readers, for example, the filter systems of indecent words or gamification elements – allowing the possibility to some users to win various statuses or levels of influence among other users, regarding the relevance and quality of their comments, and the votes they receive from other users.
Viorica Zaharia, journalist and media expert, brought practical examples of comments that have been published on various websites in Moldova and are either discriminatory or defamatory. During a practical activity, the participants analyzed together in which cases the comments can be let unchanged on the website and when they have to be edited or deleted.
In the second training day, participants have been familiarized with legal aspects and risks to which they are exposed by not administrating discriminatory comments. This session was moderated by the media law expert Olivia Pirtac. The expert presented various laws and regulations, both from Moldova and other countries, which condemn the hate-speech. In such cases, media institutions risk fees, payment for moral injury, presenting public apologies etc. The expert talked about the ethical dilemmas regarding the limit between the freedom of speech and hate speech.
In the last part of the training, the civic activist Oleg Brega, founder of CurajTV website, presented numerous examples of public online media hate speech, that discriminate social groups, on criteria such as: ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation etc.
”Even if I work in a local news portal, where the readers are not so active, comparing to the national websites, where daily hundreds and thousands of comments are placed, for me it was important to know that, up to a certain level, comments are as important as the articles themselves. Also, I understood that a community of commentators has to be built and educated when they cross some limits. The training was very useful, I managed to ”steal” some ideas from the experts, that I would like to implement”, mentioned Veaceslav Aftene, ialovenionline.md reporter
”I was offered the chance to learn and implement new techniques of content and comments administration. I realized that comments are an important technical component in a newsroom, and combating hate speech leads to a better functioning of the media institutions”, said Petru Cosoi, reporter at Unimedia.md.
The training was organized within the project ”Combating hate speech in online media and social networks”, implemented by IJC with support from Civil Rights Defender (Sweden), partner of IJC.
